[caption id="attachment_2428" align="alignnone" width="483"] Image via Quitor.com[/caption] By RFH WTF moments are frequent in China; they can happen just reading a newspaper. Today’s chin-scratcher occurred on page five of the Global Times, where, sandwiched between an only mildly splenetic front-page story about Chen Guangcheng (Chen will not have “any problems as long as he obeys the law and expresses hi ...

[caption id="attachment_2422" align="alignnone" width="490" caption="Yesterday at the US Embassy; pictured (left to right): Harold Koh, Chen Guangcheng, Gary Locke (AP Photo/US Embassy Beijing Press Office, HO)"][/caption] By RFH When is a book not a book? When it is written in the mind, perhaps, or when it is written by a politician. My proposed book about modern China has been somewhat taken over by event ...

By RFH With all the stuff going around about Bo, Bogu, Guagua, Gu and, of course, Neil and Nick Heywood, it’s getting hard for even the most Burroughs of media junkies to keep up. Every time I tell myself I’m done with it, Malcolm Moore at the Telegraph or Jeremy Page of Wall Street Journal turn up offering another fix of the good stuff. Alright, Malcolm – but dammit, this is the last time! I can’t take any ...

[Editor’s note: what follows is the first in a series of diplomatic cables, purporting to be the dispatches of Sir Charles Dashwood, a British attaché in present-day Beijing, decrypted and translated by BJC senior editor RFH] Bang! I’d only been in the Imperial Capital a few days and already my musk had attracted the bullets of an Oriental musket. Such was perfectly normal in the course of things – practica ...

Via China's Forbidden News (NTDTV.com) By RFH When Hu Yaobang, the reformist Party General Secretary whose death two year laters would spark the Tiananmen demonstrations, was purged for the second time in 1987, it was Bo Yibo who drew up the official charges. The only Politburo member who backed Hu was Xi Zhongshun, a member of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. ...

[caption id="attachment_1654" align="alignnone" width="432" caption="Bo Guagua, via China Digital Times (link below on his name)"][/caption] I first learned of Sunday’s Ferrari crash in Beijing two nights ago and didn’t think much of it until The Atlantic’s James Fallows wrote about the incident earlier today. My only question had been: Who drives fast enough on a completely deserted ring road at 4 am and c ...

By RFH We wanted to highlight our school suicide story earlier this week because we felt many of the elements surrounding the official reaction – subterfuge, censorship, a lack of respect for both the living and dead – were unfortunately far too common. Now comes another bleak story of teenage suicide – and the disgraceful reactions to them. Earlier this week, People’s Daily reported on two girls who “jumpe ...

[caption id="attachment_1226" align="alignnone" width="400" caption="Via Jinghua Times (link below)"][/caption] By RFH On February 28, students of Yuying High School were gathering on the playground at 9:30 am for their daily morning exercise when a girl appeared on the 4th floor of a north building. “She was standing at the window of a Grade 11 classroom, naked, holding her clothes,” a student recalled. “W ...

By RFH Trying to figure out what McDonald’s is up to in China is like trying to analyze a People’s Daily editorial. They’re both selling the same tired junk but it’s hard to figure out why, after all this time, they can’t do it better. Young expats who visit China undergo the same jolt of incredulity -- they deliver? Twenty-four hours, you say? -- and for a while, I, too, knew their number even when I didn’ ...